One day when I was browsing news stories, I noticed that one particular story was published not by CNN, Associated Press or the Washington Post, but instead by a small time blogger who had landed a pretty cool exclusive story. Front page Google News.

Submit Your Site – But Be Flexible

The first time I submitted my blog URL to be considered as an authorized Google News publisher, I was flat out rejected. I was pretty disappointed but I was also impressed with how Google handled the rejection. They provided very solid points about my blog that disqualified it for consideration. Most notably, I was a sole author and I had no contact information listed on my blog. So for the next couple of months, I set out to correct these two points and then try again.

The first thing I started doing was hiring authors for the site. One basic requirement for Google News is that you need a team of writers. Then I created an “About Us” page to list all of the bios for each writer.

Two months later, with a solid writing team and a page with contact details, I re-submitted my URL for consideration on Google News. Within a few weeks, I received an email from the folks at Google telling me that I’d been approved.

However, with that monumental task out of the way, reality sunk in. Getting accepted was one thing, but getting listed on the main news site was quite another. Even if you finally get accepted as a Google News publisher, there are a few more things you need to do so that the crawler will pick up on your latest updates.

Create A Googe News Sitemap

Just because you’re a publisher doesn’t mean that your site is optimized for the news crawler. Google News recommends that all publishers establish a news sitemap. Specifically they want to know the name of your “publication”, the language, access time (whether you require registration) and the Genre. There is a great Google News Sitemap plugin that will dynamically create this sitemap for you. It lets you define the default settings when you first activate it.

Each time you write a post, the footer will also have a section where you can tell Google News exactly what the post is all about. If it’s not a breaking news item, change the Genre to “Blog“, and click “Non-News Item“. This is where you also add keywords.

Identify The Originating Source

Another new technique Google is using to track down the source that originally scooped a story is by trusting publishers to tell Google who the originating source was.

The rule is pretty simple. If you are sharing a blog update about a news story you’ve read, Google News requests that you add a meta tag named “syndication-source” and assign it the URL of the original story you got it from. If you’re the the originator – if you wrote an exclusively researched news story – then use a meta tag named “original-source” and assign it the URL of your news story.

Of course, as those of you with WordPress blogs know – adding custom meta tags is easier said than done. Well, I have a solution for you.

Just place the following code in the header.php file inside the <head> section:

What this does is checks whether you’ve created a custom field named either “original-source” or “syndication-source” and if you have, it will tag the page with the appropriate meta information with the page URL.

Adding the custom tag on the post is fast and easy for you, and you make Google happy because they get a better idea of where the news story first broke.

Make sure to use the most accurate title and keywords with every post. The cool thing about doing all of this fine-tuning for Google News is that you’re also improving your site for general Google searches as well. So you get a double bonus for your efforts.

If you have a blog and you’ve tried to get approved as a Google News publisher, share your experiences with us in the comments section below. Have you had any failures or major successes? We want to know!

I have been denied by Google twice. I have a contact page with a mailing address and full contact form, but perhpas I should get rid of the address and use the phone number idea. I also have a full staff page with bios, but I don't have individual pages for each, would it matter?

Our content is all original, so I have added the orignial-source as per your suggestion. I guess I'll wait 30 days or so and then try and resubmit. Any other thoughts on your part?

When Google denied me, they gave no helpful suggestions, and I did email them back to ask, but they declined to answer back.

Excellent information. Thank you. It doesn't sound as complicated as I thought it would. Not sure about that team of writers requirement, though. How many is a 'team' and how involved do they really have to be? Oh, and cool! Just read your bio. I write about Coast to Coast Radio for one of my columns.

No problem - thanks for your comment. When I first entered the process I thought I'd be faced with some impersonal machinery - but it was surprising to see that Google was very forgiving and provided a roadmap as to how to improve the site so that it could qualify as an authorized publisher.

It's nice because Google gives even the "little guy" the chance to get published on the main news page if the story is good enough and if enough of the other sites across the web link to you as an originator of the story.

Ryan has a BSc degree in Electrical Engineering. He's worked 13 years in automation engineering, 5 years in IT, and now is an Apps Engineer. A former Managing Editor of MakeUseOf, he's spoken at national conferences on Data Visualization and has been featured on national TV and radio.